We first became aware of The World Football Elo Ratings in 2006 when my colleague Andy Coyle was looking for new angles on the then upcoming World Cup in Germany 2006.

The World Football Elo Ratings are based on the Elo rating system, developed by Dr. Arpad Elo (not to be confused with Birmingham Beatles-soundalikes ELO who racked up twenty UK hit singles in their 1970s heyday).

Dr Elo’s system is used by FIDE, the international chess federation, to rate chess players. In 1997 Bob Runyan adapted the Elo rating system to international football and posted the results on the Internet. He was also the first maintainer of the World Football Elo Ratings web site.

The system was adapted to football by adding a weighting for the kind of match, an adjustment for the home team advantage, and an adjustment for goal difference in the match result.

What I particularly like about the Elo ratings are that they allow you to look at close match-ups with a view to exploiting bookmaker’s price variances.

Invariably, on any given card, the stats will suggest that some opponents are well matched even where the bookmakers’ prices suggest not. As such, these ratings are ideal for throwing up draws, low scoring games or handicap bets that favour unfashionable teams against more illustrious opponents.

www.eloratings.net

Dr Elo’s system is used by FIDE, the international chess federation, to rate chess players.

In 1997 Bob Runyan adapted the Elo rating system to international football and posted the results on the Internet. He was also the first maintainer of the World Football Elo Ratings web site.

The system was adapted to football by adding a weighting for the kind of match, an adjustment for the home team advantage, and an adjustment for goal difference in the match result. These Elo ratings take into account all international "A" matches and ratings tend to converge on a team's true strength relative to its competitors after about 30 matches.

What I particularly like about the Elo ratings are that they allow you to look at close match-ups with a view to exploiting bookmaker’s price variances. Invariably, on any given card, the stats will suggest that some opponents are well matched even where the bookmakers’ prices suggest not. As such, these ratings are ideal for throwing up draws, low scoring games or handicap bets that favour unfashionable teams against more illustrious opponents.

We believe they are a significant improvement on the straight Fifa rankings research done by the likes of Kevin Pullein at The Racing Post.

Longer term members will remember that we road-tested the research and Andy’s take on the stats for the 2006 World Cup tournament itself.

The result of the bets, which were sent out to subscribers at www.progambler.co.uk, were very encouraging both in terms of the profits they generated and the angles that they gave us into games where me might otherwise have held no opinion.

Since then Andy, myself and Gregor Gillies have been working towards a dynamic set of ratings that will form the basis of our betting at Euro 2008 this summer.

As you can see from the link below, our work with these numbers this season has been particularly fruitful during the Euro 2008 qualifying campaign, albeit with a small sample of games.

Despite it representing unknown territory for us, Andy believes there is no reason why these numbers won’t prove equally successful at The African Nations Cup which starts in Ghana on January 20th and we’ll be turning our attention to that in due course.

At this early stage, we have not been including the returns from the international recommendations into the main body of results listed on the site however, our members have come to view these bets as a lucrative and welcome free addition to the service that also offers up betting opportunities at times in the football calendar when there is no league action.